Jan.5, 2005

Intelligence with a Heart

Emotional acumen can be organized around a variety of purposes. As an example, if what we want is to intimidate and terrorize people into compliance there is intelligence that has been used from time immemorial and constantly updated by torturers around the world who achieve their purpose by emotional means. Or if what we want is to be able to influence people to buy or vote, we can again use information already available to sophisticated ad agencies which are quite successful in using people's emotions to accomplish their client's goals.

On the personal level we can use our emotional skills to develop self-control or to soothe and isolate ourselves emotionally or we can control others by creating guilt, fear or depression. These skills can be seen as a form of emotional intelligence as well. Many who agree that emotional intelligence is an important capacity have lost sight of what we really want, skills that improve people's lives; not just one person's or exclusive group's but all people's. The emotional abilities that improve people's lives in that long term, humane manner are the love centered emotional skills.

Heart-centered EQ.
I have been studying the emotional aspect of peoples lives and developing a set of skills which I call emotional literacy. The avowed purpose of this work is to help people work with each other cooperatively, free of manipulation and coercion, using emotions empathetically to bind people together and enhance the collective quality of their lives.

The idea that love holds a central place in people's emotional lives is not a foregone conclusion. Even as everyone, deep in their heart, realizes the importance of love, it is an emotion seldom discussed in detail by experts in the field of emotions.

As a transactional analyst I am interested in, and have been studying, interpersonal relationships as they express themselves in the details of people's everyday attempts to relate to each other. The particular transactions that interest me are the component parts of love; positive affectionate expressions of recognition. Because of this, I endeavor to teach people the simple basic transactions that constitute the loving experience. This practice which is a part of the emotional literacy training program which I outline in my book Achieving Emotional Literacy is based on three concepts: Strokes, The Stroke Economy and Opening the Heart.
A "stroke" AKA as a"Warm Fuzzy" is a unit of positive affectionate human recognition. There are also negative strokes AKA "Cold Pricklies." We exchange strokes, good ones and bad ones, and these exchanges are the raw data of transactional analysis.

The stroke economy creates a scarcity of love by imposing a set of rules that govern the exchange of strokes. In essence the stroke economy frowns upon the giving, asking for and accepting strokes or giving oneself strokes. Disobedience to these rules results in feelings of guilt and shame, and in social disapproval. As people, follow the stroke economy's rules on a culture-wide basis the result is a lowering of affectionate exchanges and wide-spread stroke hunger. Stroke starved people will resort to self-damaging methods of obtaining strokes much as starving people will eat rotten food or people dying of thirst will drink salt water.
"Opening the Heart" is a practice to reverse the effects of the stroke economy. In it I teach people to give the strokes they want to give, ask for and accept strokes they want, reject strokes they don't want and give themselves strokes.

When we do this we:

* feed our stroke hunger,
* learn or relearn the important skills of stroke procurement,
* give up toxic strokes replacing them with spontaneous, intimate and health giving exchanges,
* reduce stroke scarcity and hunger in our social environment,

Beginning with an opening of the heart, subsequent emotional literacy training becomes a love centered practice in which empathic awareness becomes second nature and in which all of the other emotions -- anger, fear, shame, sadness as well as hope, joy are "managed" by a loving attitude.

What's love got to do with it? Love has everything to do with ensuring that emotional intelligence becomes emotional literacy, a skill that facilitates bonding cooperation and which is the only antidote to alienation, depression and illness.

For further readings in emotional literacy see Claude Steiner's Web Page
or write csteiner@claudesteiner.comSteiner, Claude. Achieving Emotional Literacy. A Personal Program to Improve your Emotional Intelligence. 1997 New York Avon